The field of network security has become increasingly important in today's society. In particular, the ability to effectively maintain secure and stable computers and systems presents a significant obstacle for component manufacturers, system designers, and network operators. This obstacle is made even more complicated due to the increased ease with which network systems may be manipulated, particularly in a virtualized environment. Virtualization is a software technology allowing an operating system (OS) to run in an isolated virtual environment (typically referred to as a virtual machine), where a platform's physical characteristics and behaviors are reproduced. More specifically, a virtual machine can represent an isolated, virtual environment running its own operating system and applications and being equipped with virtual hardware (processor, memory, disks, network interfaces, etc.). Commonly, the virtual machine is managed by a virtualization product. A virtual machine monitor (VMM) is the virtualization software layer that manages hardware requests from a guest OS (e.g., simulating answers from real hardware). A hypervisor is computer software/hardware platform virtualization software that may run on bare hardware and allows multiple operating systems to run on a host computer concurrently. ESX and ESXi by VMware, Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., Xen by Citrix Systems, Inc. of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., and Hyper-V by Microsoft Corp. of Redmond, Wash., represent forms of VMMs and these VMMs can be managed to better protect computers and systems from authorized and unauthorized manipulations that may affect system stability and security.